A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 7

The tyrants sit in a stately hall; They gibe at a wretched people's fall; The tyrants forget how fresh is the pall Over their dead and ours.

Look how the senators ape the clown, And don the motley and hide the gown, But yonder a fast rising frown On the people's forehead lowers.

To the same effect he wrote in unpublished poems, "Steel in Soft Hands"

and "To Our Hills": --

We mourn your fall into daintier hands Of senators, rosy fingered, That wrote while you fought, And afar from the battles lingered.

And again in "Raven Days" and "Tyranny": --

Oh, Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow, Will ever any warm light come again?

Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?

Young Trade is dead, And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern And folds his arms that find no bread to earn, And bows his head.

In a letter to his father, January 21, 1868, he wrote: "There are strong indications here of much bad feeling between the whites and blacks, especially those engaged in the late row at this place; and I have fears, which are shared by Mr. Pratt and many citizens here, that some indiscretion of the more thoughtless among the whites may plunge us into bloodshed.

The whites have no organization at all, and the affair would be a mere butchery. . . . The Canton imbroglio may precipitate matters."

Writing of laws pa.s.sed by Congress, he said: "Who will find words to express the sorrowful surprise at their total absence of philosophical insight into the age which has resulted in those hundreds of laws recently promulgated by the reigning body in the United States; laws which, if from no other cause, at least from sheer multiplicity, are wholly at variance with the genius of the time and of the people, laws which have resulted in such a ma.s.s of crime and hatred and bitterness as even the four terrible years of war have entirely failed to bring about."*

-- * 'Retrospects and Prospects', p. 31.

He recognized the need of some great man.

A pilot, G.o.d, a pilot! for the helm is left awry.

Years later, when the end of the reconstruction period had come, he described a type of man that was needed for this emergency: whether he realized it or not, it was a wish that Abraham Lincoln might have been spared to meet the situation. "I have been wondering where we are going to get a GREAT MAN, that will be tall enough to see over the whole country, and to direct that vast undoing of things which has got to be accomplished in a few years. It is a situation in which mere cleverness will not begin to work. The horizon of cleverness is too limited; it does not embrace enough of the heart of man, to enable a merely clever politician, such as those in which we abound, to lead matters properly in this juncture. The vast generosities which whirl a small revenge out of the way, as the winds whirl a leaf; the awful integrities which will pay a debt twice rather than allow the faintest flicker of suspicion about it; the splendid indignations which are also tender compa.s.sions, and will in one moment be hustling the money-changers out of the Temple, and in the next be preaching Love to them from the steps of it, -- where are we to find these?

It is time for a man to arise who is a man."*

-- * Letter to Judge Logan E. Bleckley, Nov. 15, 1874.

This state of affairs here set forth in Lanier's words caused many to leave the South in absolute despair of its future.

It drove Maurice Thompson from Georgia to Indiana, and the Le Conte brothers from Columbia to California. It caused the middle-aged Lamar to stand sorrowfully at his gate in the afternoons in Oxford, Mississippi, gazing wistfully into the west, while young men like Henry Grady -- naturally optimistic and buoyant -- wondered what could be the future for them. There is no better evidence of the heroism of Lanier than the way in which he met the situation that confronted him.

He found refuge in intellectual work. In a letter to his father he urges him to send him the latest magazines and books. June 1, 1868, he writes from Prattville: "I shall go to work on my essays, and on a course of study in German and in the Latin works of Lucretius, whom I have long desired to study." In another letter he said: "I have been deeply engaged in working out some metaphysical ideas for some time, -- an application which goes on all the time, whether I sit at desk or walk the streets." The volume of essays referred to was never published, but we have some of them in the essays "Retrospects and Prospects", "Nature-Metaphors", and some unpublished ones in an old ledger in which he wrote at this time, such as "The Oversight of Modern Philosophy", "Cause and Effect", "Time and s.p.a.ce", "The Solecisms of Mathematics", "Devil's Bombs", and other essays, which reveal Lanier's tendency to speculative philosophy and his exuberant fancy. In this same ledger he wrote down many quotations, which show that at the time he was not only keeping up with contemporary literature, but continuing his reading in German poetry.

In the meantime, December 21, 1867, Lanier had married Miss Mary Day.

"Not even the wide-mouthed, villainous-nosed, tallow-faced drudgeries of my eighty-fold life," he wrote his father, "can squeeze the sentiment out of me." From the worldly standpoint it was a serious mistake to marry, with no prospect of position and in the general upheaval of society about them. But to the two lovers no such considerations could appeal, and with his marriage to this accomplished woman came one of the greatest blessings of Lanier's life. It was "an idyllic marriage, which the poet thought a rich compensation for all the other perfect gifts which Providence denied him." She was a sufferer like himself, but her accuracy and alertness of mind, her rare appreciation of music, and her deep divining of his own powers, made her the ideal wife of the poet.

Those who know "My Springs" and the series of sonnets which he wrote to her during their separation when he was spending the winters in Baltimore, need not be told of the part that this love played in his life.

Perhaps there are no two single lines in American poetry which express better the deeper meaning of love than these: --

I marvel that G.o.d made you mine, For when He frowns 't is then ye shine.

In his later lectures at the Peabody Inst.i.tute in Baltimore, contrasting the heroines of epic poetry with the lyric woman of modern times, -- the patient wife in the secure home, -- he said: "But the daily grandeurs which every good wife, no matter how uneventful her lot, must achieve, the secret endurances which not only have no poet to sing them, but no human eye even to see them, the heroism which is as fine and bright at two o'clock in the morning as it is at noonday, all those prodigious fort.i.tudes under sorrows which one is scarcely willing to whisper even to G.o.d Almighty, and of which probably every delicate-souled woman knows, either by intuition or actual experience, -- this lyric heroism, altogether great and beautiful as it is, does not appear, save by one or two brief glimpses, in the early poetry of our ancestors."*

He could not have described better his own wife and all that she was to be in the years to come. Her fame is linked with his as is Clara Schumann's with that of the great German musician.

-- * 'Shakspere and his Forerunners', i, 99.

Chapter V. Lawyer and Traveler

Unable to secure a position in a Southern college or to make a living by literary work, Lanier decided at the end of 1868 to take up the profession of law. He was led to do so by the earnest solicitation of his father. With his mind once made up in that direction, he went to the work with characteristic zeal.

He displayed a business-like and methodical spirit which at once attracted attention. On November 19, 1869, he wrote to his brother, who was urging him to go into the cotton-mill business: "I have a far more feasible project, which I have been long incubating: let us go to Brunswick. We know something of the law, and are rapidly knowing more; it is a business which is far better than that of any salaried officer could possibly be. . . .

It is best that you and I make up our minds immediately to be lawyers, NOTHING BUT LAWYERS, GOOD lawyers, and SUCCESSFUL lawyers; and direct all our energies to this end. We are too far in life to change our course now; it would be greatly disadvantageous to both of us. Therefore, to the law, Boy. It is your vocation; stick to it: It will presently reward you for your devotion."

The scheme did not materialize, however; he remained at Macon in the office of Lanier and Anderson. He writes to Northrup, who has again held out to him a plan for going to Germany: --

"As for my sweet old dreams of studying in Germany, EHEU!

here is come a wife, and by'r Lady, a boy, a most rare-lung'd, imperious, world-grasping, blue-eyed, kingly Manikin;* and the same must have his tiring-woman or nurse, mark you, and his laces and embroideries and small carriage, being now half a year old: so that, what with mine ancient Money-Cormorants, the Butcher and the Baker and the Tailor, my substance is like to be so pecked up that I must stick fast in Georgia, unless litigation and my reputation should take a simultaneous start and both grow outrageously. For, you must know, these Southern colleges are all so poor that they hold out absolutely no inducement in the way of support to a professor: and so last January I suddenly came to the conclusion that I wanted to make some money for my wife and my baby, and incontinently betook me to studying Law: wherein I am now well advanced, and, D.V., will be admitted to the Bar in May next. My advantages are good, since my Father and uncle (firm of Lanier and Anderson) are among the oldest lawyers in the city and have a large practice, into which I shall be quickly inducted.

-- * Charles Day Lanier. See poem, "Baby Charley".

"I have not, however, ceased my devotion to letters, which I love better than all things in my heart of hearts; and have now in the hands of the Lit. Bureau in N.Y. a vol. of essays.

I'm (or rather have been) busy, too, on a long poem, yclept the 'Jacquerie', on which I had bestowed more REAL WORK than on any of the frothy things which I have hitherto sent out; tho' this is now necessarily suspended until the summer shall give me a little rest from the office business with which I have to support myself while I am studying law."*

-- * 'Lippincott's Magazine', March, 1905.

Lanier's work as a lawyer was that of the office, as he never practiced in the courts. To the accuracy and fidelity of this work the words of his successor, Chancellor Walter B. Hill of the University of Georgia, bear testimony: --

"About 1874 or 1875 I became a.s.sociated as partner with the firm of Lanier and Anderson, in whose office Sidney Lanier practiced law up to the time he left Macon [1869-1873] -- I do not know whether he was a partner in the firm or whether he merely used the same office. At any rate, it seems that the greater part of his work consisted in the examination of t.i.tles. The firm of Lanier and Anderson represented several building and loan a.s.sociations and had a large business in this line of work. To examine a t.i.tle, as you know, requires a visit to what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls 'that cemetery of dead transactions', the place for the official registry of deeds and other muniments of t.i.tle, called in Georgia the office of the Clerk of the Superior Court.

One cannot imagine work that is more dry-as-dust in its character than going over these records for the purpose of tracing the successive links in a chain of t.i.tle. When I came into the firm I had occasion frequently to examine the letter-press copybook in which Lanier's 'abstracts'

or reports upon t.i.tle had been copied. Not only were the books themselves models of neatness, but all his work in the examination of t.i.tles showed the utmost thoroughness, patience, and fidelity. The law of Georgia in regard to the registration of t.i.tles was by no means perfect at that time; so imperfect, indeed, that I have known prominent lawyers to refuse to engage in the work on account of the risk of error involved.

I remained a member of the firm for some time afterwards, but during the whole period of my residence in Macon I never heard any question raised as to the correctness and thoroughness of Lanier's work in this difficult and intricate department of practice.

In going over some of his work I have often keenly felt the contrast between such toil and that for which Lanier's genius fitted him.

To find that the poet spent many laborious days in such uninspiring labor was as great an anomaly as it would be to see a fountain spring from a bed of sawdust and 'shake its loosened silver in the sun'."*

-- * Letter to the author.

While engaged in the practice of law, Lanier now and then made public addresses. The most important of these was the Confederate Memorial Address, April 26, 1870.*

The spirit and the language of it are equally admirable.

He who had suffered all that any man could suffer during the Civil War and during the reconstruction period shows that he has risen above all bitterness and prejudice. There is no threshing over of dead issues.

The spirit of the address is more like that seen in the letters of Robert E. Lee than any other thing written by Southerners during this period. Lanier is not yet national in his point of view, but he represents the best att.i.tude of mind that could be held by the most liberal of Southerners at that time. Standing in the cemetery at Macon, -- one of the most beautiful in the Southern States, -- he begins: "In the unbroken silence of the dead soldierly forms that lie beneath our feet; in the winding processions of these stately trees; in the large tranquillity of this vast and benignant heaven that overspreads us; in the quiet ripple of yonder patient river, flowing down to his death in the sea; in the manifold melodies drawn from these green leaves by wandering airs that go like Troubadours singing in all the lands; in the many-voiced memories that flock into this day, and fill it as swallows fill the summer, -- in all these, there is to me so voluble an eloquence to-day that I cannot but shrink from the harsher sounds of my own human voice." Taking these as a text, he comments first on the necessity for silence in an age when "trade is the most boisterous G.o.d of all the false G.o.ds under heaven."

The clatter of factories, the clank of mills, the groaning of forges, the sputtering and laboring of his water power, are all lost sight of in contemplating the august presence of the dead, who speak not.

He speaks next of the stateliness of the trees, which suggests to him the stateliness of the two great heroes of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, -- "bright, magnificent exemplars of stateliness, -- those n.o.ble figures that arose and moved in splendid procession across the theatre of our Confederate war!"

The patience of the river suggests the soldiers who walked their life of battle, "patient through heat and cold, through rain and drought, through bullets and diseases, through hunger and nakedness, through rigor of discipline and laxity of morals, ay, through the very shards and pits of h.e.l.l, down to the almost inevitable death that awaited them."

-- * 'Retrospects and Prospects', p. 94.

The most significant pa.s.sage, however, is his appeal to the men and women of the South to rise to the plane of tranquillity and magnanimity: --

"I spoke next of the tranquillity of the over-spanning heavens.